Andrew Saba

Andrew Saba, Aderotimi Adetunji, Adam Johnson et al.

Autonomous motorsports aim to replicate the human racecar driver with software and sensors. As in traditional motorsports, Autonomous Racing Vehicles (ARVs) are pushed to their handling limits in multi-agent scenarios at extremely high ($\geq 150mph$) speeds. This Operational Design Domain (ODD) presents unique challenges across the autonomy stack. The Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) is an international competition aiming to advance autonomous vehicle development through ARV competitions. While far from challenging what a human racecar driver can do, the IAC is pushing the state of the art by facilitating full-sized ARV competitions. This paper details the MIT-Pitt-RW Team's approach to autonomous racing in the IAC. In this work, we present our modular and fast approach to agent detection, motion planning and controls to create an autonomy stack. We also provide analysis of the performance of the software stack in single and multi-agent scenarios for rapid deployment in a fast-paced competition environment. We also cover what did and did not work when deployed on a physical system the Dallara AV-21 platform and potential improvements to address these shortcomings. Finally, we convey lessons learned and discuss limitations and future directions for improvement.

Claire McLean, Makenzie Meendering, Tristan Swartz et al.

The Codec Avatars Lab at Meta introduces Embody 3D, a multimodal dataset of 500 individual hours of 3D motion data from 439 participants collected in a multi-camera collection stage, amounting to over 54 million frames of tracked 3D motion. The dataset features a wide range of single-person motion data, including prompted motions, hand gestures, and locomotion; as well as multi-person behavioral and conversational data like discussions, conversations in different emotional states, collaborative activities, and co-living scenarios in an apartment-like space. We provide tracked human motion including hand tracking and body shape, text annotations, and a separate audio track for each participant.

Anish Bhattacharya, Akshit Gandhi, Lukas Merkle et al.

For robotic systems to succeed in high risk, real-world situations, they have to be quickly deployable and robust to environmental changes, under-performing hardware, and mission subtask failures. These robots are often designed to consider a single sequence of mission events, with complex algorithms lowering individual subtask failure rates under some critical constraints. Our approach utilizes common techniques in vision and control, and encodes robustness into mission structure through outcome monitoring and recovery strategies. In addition, our system infrastructure enables rapid deployment and requires no central communication. This report also includes lessons in rapid field robotic development and testing. We developed and evaluated our systems through real-robot experiments at an outdoor test site in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, as well as in the 2020 Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge. All competition trials were completed in fully autonomous mode without RTK-GPS. Our system placed fourth in Challenge 2 and seventh in the Grand Challenge, with notable achievements such as popping five balloons (Challenge 1), successfully picking and placing a block (Challenge 2), and dispensing the most water onto an outdoor, real fire with an autonomous UAV (Challenge 3).